Bookspace.org — Glenn Peter­son, Mar­i­lyn Turner (Hen­nepin County Library)

Mar­i­lyn

book site went live on valentine’s day
con­tri­bu­tions from staff and read­ers have been key
hen­nepin county is a county of read­ers
– on aver­age, every sub­ur­ban HC res­i­dent checked out 17 books, DVDs, and CDs in 2006
– twice the national average

wanted to max­i­mize this when redesign­ing their site
– wanted to bring together rel­e­vant resources for a par­tic­u­lar genre or sub­ject
– to allow librar­i­ans to eas­ily con­tribute con­tent with­out need any pro­gram­ming knowledge

when they came up with the name “book­space,” it was con­ceived as a true space where peo­ple could read, share, and learn
domain name was owned by a young adult librar­ian in mis­souri who was never able to use it so she gave it to them to use

lat­est blog post title appears on the home page
email newslet­ter that goes out every other month
fea­tured read­ers list
find a good book

who is work­ing on the site?
– coör­di­na­tor
– work­group of 5 librar­i­ans
– con­trib­u­tors (30 librar­i­ans)
— 2 librar­i­ans on each genre page team

easy to use tools for the librar­i­ans, all form-based on the web
they help each other to show new blog authors how easy it is
these are not vol­un­teer activ­i­ties, which is impor­tant
– this is part of your job and part of your per­for­mance expec­ta­tion
– it’s become an expec­ta­tion over the last few years that their librar­i­ans will add con­tent to the web

Glenn

social fea­tures
– user com­ments on books and other titles
— right now there are 234 com­ments on the final Harry Pot­ter book; com­ments started on this title while it was still on order
– blogs, where users can also com­ment
– book­lists
– list top con­trib­u­tors of com­ments
– “It’s Alive“
– user pro­files
— more than just screen names
— bring together user’s com­ments and book­lists on their pro­file page
— also show what they have checked out as a wall of books (“what they’re reading”)

look­ing ahead
– new ways to con­nect users
— users who are read­ing x are also read­ing y
— face­book “wall“
— show user’s “friends”

chal­lenges
– con­trol issues

geek stuff
– database-driven
– RSS every­where
– Cold­Fu­sion (or ASP, PHP, etc.)

take­aways
– draw on library staff
– empower your users (they want to add con­tent, espe­cially your younger users)
– cre­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties for serendip­ity
– let users interact

slides at http://hclib.org/extranet/

John: The Social Catalog

the trans­for­ma­tive library
based on “The Expe­ri­ence Econ­omy” book -
ser­vices, goods = 1.0
trans­for­ma­tion puts ser­vices, goods, and expe­ri­ence (par­tic­i­pa­tion) together into a whole = 2.0
the media ecol­ogy is chang­ing rapidly
the way we con­duct busi­ness means we need to change the way we do things

cre­ate an expe­ri­ence in the library itself to offer a trans­for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence for the user
the social cat­a­log is one way to do this
a vital interim step to wher­ever we end up going

3 social cat­a­log envi­ron­ments
1. pseudo-social
— author­ity pre­sented as col­lab­o­ra­tive (ie Encore); sub­ject head­ings as tag cloud
— there’s no feed­back loop, though, no real col­lab­o­ra­tive expe­ri­ence, and not really social
2. syn­di­cated social
— 3rd party data (ie Library­Thing for Libraries)
— the results you get are gen­er­ally well-formed and almost always out­strip the use­ful­ness of sub­ject head­ings
— but get a homo­ge­neous blend of infor­ma­tion from a par­tic­u­lar record
3. indi­vid­u­ally social
— user-direct and self-contained (ie Hen­nepin, SOPAC)
— run into other lim­i­ta­tions, such as crit­i­cal mass of content

showed Michi­gan State University’s imple­men­ta­tion of Encore
– tag cloud, AJAX
– not really a social sys­tem, though, even though inter­face ele­ments are indica­tive of social sites

showed Dan­bury Library’s imple­men­ta­tion of Library­Thing for Libraries
– tags, but still no real social elements

showed Ann Arbor’s SOPAC
– users tak­ing advan­tage of the social ele­ments are prob­a­bly teens, prob­a­bly a hand­ful of them (so have to be care­ful your data analy­sis isn’t skewed)

you need to ask your­self…
– do we want non-authoritative (user-generated) meta­data asso­ci­ated with a record dis­play?
— only your insti­tu­tion can decide
— author­i­ta­tive and non-authoritative infor­ma­tion can co-exist
– if you include folk­son­omy, do you:
— want it to orig­i­nate from syn­di­cated data?
— reflect your com­mu­nity?
— if you don’t have the con­tent, how do you pro­vide the incen­tive to use the sys­tem? and if you don’t have incen­tive to use the sys­tem, how do you have the con­tent?
– what kind of devel­op­ment is involved?

the net­work effect

ques­tion: how do you prime the pump for com­ments?
answer: glenn — thinks we’ll see a phased approach in pop­u­lar­ity; needs to build, not there from day one; their sta­tis­tics show that peo­ple are more inter­ested in read­ing than con­tribut­ing, but thinks that will change over time; Mar­i­lyn: Glenn has put the oppor­tu­nity to com­ment in places she hadn’t thought of (where nor­mally it would be an email); have done a lot of PR with prizes when they intro­duce these types of things; can put your name in to win after you comment